Social Cognition

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Social Cognition

ABC model (It's as easy as ABC!):

Affective - Feelings, reflection of values
Behavioural- What we want to do
Cognitive- Beliefs, ideas, opinions

Functions of Attitudes:

Adaptive/Instrumental: maximising rewards, minimising punishments by guiding behaviour toward desired goal.
Self-Expressive: give meaning to our lives through telling others about ourselves (self-concept)
Ego-defensive: protecting self esteem from life's harsh realities
Knowledge: understanding and predicting our social world

One attitude may serve all four functions

Impressions
Non- verbal
  • Posture- standing tall, slouching
  • Facial Emotion - 6 emotions
  • Physical charactor - gender, height, age
  • "The Face" - shape, features

Verbal Communications
  • Sematic Level (the detail)
  • Expression Level (the sound and expression)

Five Basic Principles of Impression
  • Impressions are formed from limited, external information - can only judge on what we can see.
  • Impressions are based partly on sterotypes - judging people according to their behaviour
  • First impression based on external cues- first 15 seconds
  • Impessions consist on judgement made on 3 levels - Physical, Socio - cultural Psychological

Impression Management
  • A process by which people in social situation manage the settings, their dress, words and gestures.
  • Creating a good and last impression
  • to control their impression of you

Self handicapping
  • an impression management strategy
  • protects self image - e.g. uses excuse if fails

Social Comparison: Enables us to:
  • Evaluates our own opinion and abilities. e.g. comparing your self to others
  • helps us figure out our strenghts and weaknesses
  • Gives us self knowledge

Upwards Comparrsion - compare ourselves who are socially better than us in some way
Downwards Comparison- to boost ego


peer sideways comparison - compare yourself to some one who is socially similar

Persuasion:
2 main routes of persuasion:
Central (For highly intelligent thinking people, such as Mark Phillipe)
  • Information
  • Facts
  • Credible sources
  • Makes viewer think about message
  • Provokes high emotion levels
  • High elaboration
  • More durable attitude change
  • Persuasion based on content and logic of the message

Peripheral (For stupid non-thinking people, e.g. Samuel Phelan)
  • Subliminal messages
  • Imagery
  • Humour
  • Doesn't require much thinking
  • When issue is not personally relevant or important
  • Low elaboration
  • Less durable attitude change
  • Persuasion based on nonmessage factors such as attractiveness and emotion

Factors Affecting Persuasion
Source:
.....Who - (who is directing the information)
  • experts - credibility, expertise, power
  • Attractiveness - likability, status, similarity
  • Talking speed - speaking style
Message:
.....What (what is being used to persuade)
  • strong emotions - fear vs logic, repitition, novelty
  • subliminal messages (limited effect)
Channel:
.....How
  • In person
  • On TV
  • Radio
  • Video
  • etc.
Audience:
.....To whom (the audience)
  • determines whether the central or peripheral route is used
  • Central route- thinking people
  • Peripheral route- self conscious
  • also included age, gender, attention span ect